After finishibg the game, I think that the end was brilliant. It showed the whole game from the different position.

Click to reveal..

My brother never became an adult, he drowned as a child. But this knowledge is too painful for me and was suppressed deeply in my subconscious. Instead was created the idea of the brother - an engineer, the mysterious machine, his disappearence and so on...

You’ve played the game but have you felt it. I thought I’d present my experience of OutCry and offer up my opinions on the story.I wondered as I played (as most did I’m sure), where was all of this going but it wasn’t until the very last scene that all the elements that made up the game came rushing back and ‘clicked’’. The subtle nuances that had no significance at first sight played their part in telling the whole picture. I hadn’t had that feeling since M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense’s”.Let me see, on the surface, the game was about a writer who upon finding out that his brother, a university professor, has died decides to follow in his footsteps. Perhaps to discover the significance of the professors work and then write about it. It certainly appeared that the brother of this professor followed his footsteps into incomprehensible worlds.

Click to reveal..

The ending of the game shows the brother/writer drowning and the young professor unable to save him. How can this be? How can the player’s character have died in his youth and still exist in adulthood? The answer is easy; the writer never existed into adulthood except in the mind of the professor. A mind that has been riddled with guilt and depression ever since. The professor blames himself for ‘pushing’ his brother into helping him with his steamboat on that winter day. The professor never pursued a curiosity in inventing a machine that enters other worlds. He was running a way from pain and pursued something to numb that pain. The game as a whole was played out in the professor’s drug induced mind.

Let’s look at some of the “Shyamalan” element’s that gave hindsight clues to this. 1.The old film like effects that represent old home movies or events that have happened. The replaying of events.2.No pictures of the professor’s adult life or his brother. Seems life for the professor stopped when his brother died.3.All paintings where sad. No up lifting paintings, just depression.4.The description of Albertia having the effect of dual personality.5.The diary states that the professor would like to erase that tragic childhood memory but can’t. It’s “unbearable”.6.Anemus (sp?), the man on the tram saying that “the person you are looking for is no longer here”. This has a different meaning in hindsight.7.The professors withdraw from lectures, not paying bills and just generally not caring what happens to him.8.The professor, during the game, trying to protect his brother to the point of over protection. Perhaps to make up for what he couldn’t do in the past. This is exampled by warning his brother not to follow in his footsteps, blowing the fuse for the chamber, correcting or erasing his memory of the dog attack.

There are probably more examples but it’s been a few weeks now. I do remember feeling sad for this individual who has had a life time of suffering over a tragic event and in the end may have taken his life to end the pain.

That is a great insight, Mordack.But maybe you can also look at it in the opposite way.

It is the writer who arrived on the train going through journey of remembrance.Remember what is in the professor's letter when he asked him to come:I hope that you have not forgotten my existence here.

Your point is guilt. How about grief?Grief can do so many unexpected things.

I thought about it for awhile and I am still of the belief it's as I've explained above. Mostly because the diary is the professors and it's the diary that mentions the 'tragedy'. The line from the letter you mention could certain be applied in both our visions.I'll also stick with guilt because if you remember all the house mirrors have been removed. To me that would indicate guilt. Guilt can certainly last a life time, most often grief is overcome. Love to hear thoughts of any kind though.Oh and thanks for the spoiler tag. Should have know better.

Hi catsmom, yes this too played out in the mine of the professor. I guess I could explain it in different terms. Say your cooking Christmas diner (mmm, turkey!) and you want everything to be perfect. At some point you may play out in your mine family arriving, what they would say, what they would do and you do this to try and make things just right. Well, the professor, under the influence of drugs, imagined his brother coming to visit him. He longed-for his brother out of guilt and through drugs eased his pain and imagined his brother as an adult coming to visit him. Remember nothing was real.

Mordack, how old do you think the proffesor was? Seems his voice was elderly. So do you think he lived his life feeling guilty about not helping his brother? And when he discovered Albertia he tried to relive the accident and offer his hand to help his brother? It just seemed to me the drowning brother was gone before he offered his hand to help.

Interesting thoughts; I've just finished the game and was a little puzzled at first but of course it all makes sense. This is a game that needs to be replayed, I think - for the subtle clues that are there and that lead up to that ending. My first thought, however, was that all of this might have been a dream the professor had; certainly, the whole story is about guilt - he clearly feels guilty for having been unable to save his brother from drowning. The professor also mentions in one of his diaries that things he does in "The Shimmering World" have an effect on the "real world" - we don't know if this is true or maybe just wishful thinking. But with this statement in mind, I think that he actually did try to go back to that crucial moment in his earlier life to save his brother, thus changing reality - in this new reality, his brother would still be alive. It just seems he didn't make it and relives all his memories over and over again, trying forever to save his brother from certain death - it's a timeloop he cannot get out of.

I must admit that during the first two chapters, I found the game pretty boring and just couldn't see a storyline there. But with *this* ending, it all makes sense. I just wish that some of the puzzles had been easier - I almost gave up on that harp tower

One last thing: Did you guys notice that in the last world we enter, the winter land, the snow actually falls upwards? I keep wondering if this has a special meaning.

the boy drowing at the end is not the writer but the professor and that the writer, out of guilt, imagined his brother would become a renowend professor later, building strange machines?

Because to me it seemed quite clear that

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the boy drowning was the writer = me, the player - you see yourself moving toward the broken ice and in the next instance you're underwater while the brother reaches out his hand to rescue you

Hm. Tricky situation. I think this demands a replay or at least a re-read of all the documents collected.One thing I'm still not sure about and that doesn't fit in for me at all is the dolmens. Any ideas on that? I thought they were crucial because they were mentioned quite a lot in the beginning - or maybe this was just meant to lead the players on the wrong track?

the boy drowing at the end is not the writer but the professor and that the writer, out of guilt, imagined his brother would become a renowend professor later, building strange machines?

Because to me it seemed quite clear that

Click to reveal..

the boy drowning was the writer = me, the player - you see yourself moving toward the broken ice and in the next instance you're underwater while the brother reaches out his hand to rescue you

Click to reveal..

That confused me too. It seemed to me I might suddenly have exchanged point-of-view between one brother and the other at the end. But then the sequence at the end where you click on the shadow of the brother in order to find another note, then after reading the note you see another shadow of the brother to click on, etc., and then finally you click on the dark hole in the ice and end up in the water... that reminded me of the sequence towards the end of the movie 2001, where the astronaut would see an older version of himself and then become that version -- essentially following another version of himself from place to place... Following that idea would mean that clicking on the shadow of the brother meant you were following another version of yourself in the game.

I think the explanation I'm settling on is the character you're playing is the memory of the brother (who the professor imagined would become a writer when he grew up), still alive in the unconscious memory of the brother that didn't drown. That the landscape of that unconscious memory is fragmented and decaying indicates to me that the mind of the surviving brother is falling apart -- possibly because of drug use, but my guess is by death. Although the surviving brother has now also died, shredded fragments of memory are still remaining in his decomposing brain. Remember towards the end the brother says the two brothers haven't seen each other for a long time. Now that both are dead they are together again, and this is the last time the professor (appearing as the young boy you see at the end) will relive the experience of trying to rescue his brother in his mind.

I've received an email from a very good friend of mine, she was so positively impressed by Outcry that she wanted to say her feelings about the game and asked some questions, so I suggested that I post in here and I can pass her on your answers:

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I'd like to tell you a simple story: a story about two brothers. Two gifted kids: one of them, the elder, is very keen on scienze and all that implies inventiveness and experimental attitudes, and the younger happens to be more skilled at literary fields of application.One day, at the first melting of ice, the kids go to a half-frozen pond to launch a toy steamboat; they dream of shipping it towards warmer lands. While messing around the younger falls in the pond; his brother, unable to help him with his bare hands, has nothing left but stare at him disappear into the chilled waters with a gruesome sense of guilt.As people say life goes on, and the survived child becomes a scientist; a clever and enlighted man of knowledge. Throughout his researches he gets in touch with ancient techniques verging to separate the distinct functions of human mind that, bound as a whole, allows the being to run an ordinary life in a so-called univocal reality, where time owns irrevocable linear features: present always leaves back the past as plain memories and future follows the present – who knows what…

Maybe that at first the man was attracted by the mere scientific aspect of his discoveries, it's not relevant, but a time came when he fully grasped their outermost implications: go back to the past and save his brother's life in order to grant him a future existence.

The same role of the player attests that in the end he succeeded.

Was that the meaning of the notes left by the scientist with the request not to follow his steps? Is it that he didn't want his brother to know the truth about his death and return to life?

Is that the content of the final sentence superimposed on the image of the boy with his hand stretched out in anguish? I could understand no more than "Dear brother, we didn't meet for ages…" As you can easily deduce from my writing I'm not from an English – speaking country, and the music became louder and louder while the voice was fading.Something makes me think it was not casual…

Your friend had a much more cheerful impression of what happened than I did. I just had another theory though...

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...that if the scientific brother did succeed in changing the past, and saving the writer brother, it might have been at the expense of his own life force existing in the real world. Making the change that saved the brother might have been what caused him not to be able to return from the "Shimmering World."